In March 2020, during the initial outbreak of Covid-19 in the UK, TV presenter Kate Garraway and her husband Derek Draper discussed the impact the virus could possibly have on the country.
“I can remember the week before he [Draper] got sick, he was saying ‘I think we’re going to have a lockdown, I think the schools are going to close, we need to think about it’,” Garraway recalled in a BBC interview later that year.
But neither of them could have predicted the devastating impact the virus would have personally on Draper’s health. After his initial diagnosis, the author and former political adviser spent 98 days in a medically induced coma.
Draper’s body was ravaged by Covid. He was reported as being the longest surviving patient with coronavirus after 184 days in and out of intensive care. He suffered extreme complications related to the disease, and died earlier this week aged 56.
In the almost four years between his diagnosis and his death, Garraway stayed in the public eye and talked openly about the family’s struggles, raising the profile of carers and awareness of long Covid in the process.
‘Our story is your story’
Draper returned home from hospital on 8 April 2021 – around 13 months after first being diagnosed.
“He is still here, which means there is hope,” Garraway said at the time, reflecting a sense of optimism that captured the mood of the country, as the public were still grieving the loss of loved ones whilst also dreaming of some kind of return to normal life.
By that point, the UK had been through several lockdowns. The death toll from Covid had recently reached 100,000.
Draper’s illness may have been a personal story, but it was one that so many people experiencing that same heartbreak and hope could empathise with.
Garraway began sharing regular updates on her husband’s health soon after he was diagnosed. The Good Morning Britain presenter documented the impact of the virus on her family – not just on social media, but also in documentaries and books.
In March 2021, ITV broadcast Finding Derek, an intimate and moving one-hour documentary which explored Draper’s illness and its effects on Kate and their two children – daughter Darcey, then 15, and 11-year-old son Billy.
Cameras followed Garraway as she got the family home ready for Draper’s return. She instructed builders on where to install wheelchair ramps in her home, dealt regularly with doctors who discussed Derek’s progress, and spoke to other people who were suffering the effects of long Covid.
The documentary, recorded over the course of a year, also showed the first time Derek had spoken in seven months. He was filmed the previous October saying the word “pain” to his wife, who became emotional as she watched over FaceTime.
It was Garraway’s realistic yet optimistic attitude that brought comfort to others similarly affected. “I’ve never loved Derek more – or feared losing him more,” she said in Finding Derek.
“Is he going to be alive but no longer the same person? Am I grieving for the man I married? Or fighting to hold on to him when I should be trying to adjust?”
She concluded that it “may be a rather beautiful thing as we might have to fall in love all over again”.
Finding Derek resonated with viewers and went on to win a National Television Award – voted for by the public – for best authored documentary.
Accepting the trophy, Garraway told the audience: “Thank you so much for voting, I wonder if the reason why you did is because our story is your story.
“I think we’ve all been touched by the pandemic whether it’s livelihoods, mental health… if you’re still living with the scars, the fight goes on.
“Whatever you’re going through and however you’re affected, you’re not forgotten,” she added.
“We want the joy back… the hope is real.”
A year later, Garraway won a second NTA for her follow-up documentary, Caring For Derek. She also published two books, titled The Power of Hope and The Strength of Love.
Within the pages, Garraway shared her personal story in the hope she could “help anyone who has ever felt desperate, lonely or experienced profound loss”.
The TV presenter said she decided to share her husband’s story as “he’s a psychotherapist and a psychologist. So I feel like, that he would want his journey to be told”.
Draper, who was born in Chorley, Lancashire in 1967, worked as a former researcher for Peter Mandelson and played a key role behind the scenes in the creation of New Labour in the 1990s.
He chose not to follow his boss into government after Sir Tony Blair’s election victory, however, and instead became a political lobbyist.
His career was not without controversy. In 1998, while director of the company GPC Market Access, he was caught by the Observer newspaper boasting about his contacts with ministers. “There are 17 people who count in this government, and to say I am intimate with all of them is the understatement of the century,” he reportedly claimed.
Draper denied any wrongdoing but the scandal – dubbed “lobbygate” – led to him being fired from his job. He remained a fervent supporter of New Labour but left politics to retrain as a psychotherapist.
A decade later, he returned and founded the left-wing news website LabourList, but hit the headlines again when leaked emails revealed he discussed setting up a new blog called RedRag to peddle false rumours about Conservative MPs with Damian McBride, then a senior aide to then prime minister Gordon Brown.
In the emails, he described the idea as “absolutely, totally brilliant”. Draper later said he regretted his “stupid, hasty reply”, adding that he should have “said straight away that the idea was wrong”, but the story was enough to make him resign from his role as editor of LabourList and marked the end of his career at Westminster.
His high-profile battle with Covid years later came at a time when the whole country was dealing with the challenges of the virus and lockdowns. Many praised Garraway for the example she set in the way she dealt with her husband’s illness.
Garraway found solace in gardening. She said spending time outdoors had become a “lifeline for her family” as she was planting fruit and vegetable seeds in the hope that they would be ready to eat when her husband came home.
“When you are living day to day on a knife’s edge, doing something that gives you a future just helps create a sense of progress,” she told the BBC’s Gardner’s World in October 2020.
She said that by caring for her plants and “not letting them die, it’s doing something to keep the hope and spirit alive”, adding that gardening had helped create a more open dialogue with her daughter Darcey about Derek’s condition.
“You ask a teenager about how they feel about the fact Dad might die, and it’s too big a thing to take on,” she said. “But when you’re sitting there planting radishes, she would start asking the questions, and that allowed us to talk about it. It was doing something really positive and I was so proud of her for that.”
While spending time outdoors, Garraway explained: “I would just focus on the movement of the leaves, and try and stop the adrenaline and calm me, it’s kind of mindfulness, and I think the garden is very effective, and I think being in nature, whatever patch you can get to, is really good for any stress and I think it’s made the world of difference. “
In Garraway’s second documentary, Caring for Derek, which aired on ITV in February 2022, Draper was seen being released from hospital, finally able to come home.
Garraway admitted to experiencing loneliness as she became a carer for her husband, who still required around-the-clock support. “I still hope we’ll have a happy ending, but ultimately it just feels unsustainable,”she said.
But Draper’s health problems continued. In early December, a month before his death, he suffered a cardiac arrest. Garraway spent Christmas with him in hospital.
Over the last four years, the ITV presenter has been credited with raising the profile of carers in the UK – of which it is estimated there are more than five million – as she continued to speak publicly about her and Draper’s journey.
Carers Trust CEO Kirsty McHugh said: “Derek’s illness and Kate Garraway’s devoted care for him touched the hearts of so many of us.
“By sharing her own experience, Kate shone a light on the selfless care that millions of family members give to their loved ones across the UK. All too often, unpaid carers are hidden away but Kate laid bare the very real challenges so many families face and the support they need.”
It was a sentiment echoed by Garraway’s ITV colleagues at the beginning of Friday’s episode of daytime programme Loose Women, which aired shortly after the announcement of Draper’s death.
“In such personal difficulties that they experienced, Kate was able to raise her head and speak to the rest of the caring community out there,” said host Kaye Adams, “and she was always aware of the many other people in this country who found themselves in a similar situation throughout Covid.”
Fellow panellist Sue Cleaver agreed. “We all got to accompany Kate on this terrible journey through these amazing documentaries that she made,” she said. “[It was] the darkest time of their lives, and yet she was still able to highlight the roles of carers everywhere today.”
